1. Technical Field
Embodiments of the present invention generally relate to online commerce and server-client communication conducted over a network such as the Internet and, more particularly, to a client assisted mechanism for URL shortening that provides user-visible iconography.
2. Related Art
A uniform resource locater (URL) when used to reference a location, e.g., a webpage or data file, on the Internet often includes lengthy descriptive attributes, which may represent, for example, data hierarchies, command structures, transaction paths, and session information. Such a URL may be long, difficult to read, and virtually impossible to remember.
With the growing popularity of social networking websites that facilitate various forms of instant communication, such as “tweets” and “status updates”, which may also generally be referred to as “microblogging”, and the concomitant use of microblogging applications, for which efficient (e.g., brief) text communication is at a premium, URL shorteners (e.g., URL shortening services) have emerged as a way to permit the inclusion of (often very long) URL links into a micro blog message while keeping short the character count of the message in order to fit within the size limitations of microblogging websites. URL shortening services do that by providing a shortened URL for a longer one and redirecting a user to the longer URL corresponding to the shortened one. Conventional URL shortening services may still result, however, in the use of a dozen characters or more for the shortened URL, and are typically opaque to a user in the sense that the user can't tell from looking at the shortened link what clicking on the link will do, e.g., show the user a photo or take the user to a product page.
Embodiments of the present disclosure and their advantages are best understood by referring to the detailed description that follows. It should be appreciated that like reference numerals are used to identify like elements illustrated in one or more of the figures, in which the showings therein are for purposes of illustrating the embodiments and not for purposes of limiting them.